When I did sex education in school in the early 1980s. We only got to Syphilis, Gonorrhea and Herpes when it came to sexually transmitted diseases.
AIDS did not exist. It was only some months later when news reports mentioned a disease that targeted male gays in America.
Soon the media went hysterical. AIDS was not something that affected gay men in San Francisco or New York. It was here in Britain.
Even as a young naive but cynical teenager. Something whirred in my mind. How did the disease know if a person was gay? What if you were bisexual?
What I did not know at the time. The media, politicians, religious groups had a vested interest in keeping AIDS as a men only gay only disease. Just think how many people died with that line of thinking.
Russell T Davies has wanted to do a drama on the 1980s AIDS crisis affecting young British men for some years.
The first episode had a zippiness which seems to evade many of these Netflix/Amazon binge dramas. It has the trademark RTD economy. No better demonstrated in that Hooked on Classics montage where Ritchie goes from being a novice (you need a wash) to a confident outgoing teenager.
The downside I was expecting more regarding the impact of AIDS and at times this was treading a similar path to Queer as Folk. It seems the first episode kept AIDS in the periphery. Newspaper headlines and of course Mr Coltrane getting some kind of a rare cancer.